Review

A review of Clint Metcalf's Tensionism

Clint Metcalf, "prime cinnabar," acrylic on canvas, 24" x 24" triptych. Image: courtesy of the artist

Underground Gallery
Kansas City Artists Coalition
Kansas City, Missouri
March 5 — 26, 2010

Growing up in Chicago, artist Clint Metcalf remembers the graffiti emblazoned on the walls of the city. It was partially from these memories that the paintings shown in his exhibition Tensionism derive. An illustrator whose focus was watercolor paintings of western sense and cattle drives, Metcalf has only been painting abstractly for five or six years, and he has only been willing to exhibit these paintings within the last two.

Aside from his childhood memories of the graffitied Chicago streets, Metcalf cites two schools of art as influential to his own work. He speaks about his affinity to Jackson Pollock, Brice Marden, and the New York School artists as particularly engaging. It is easy to spot parallels between the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic and Metcalf’s use of the paint. Long, sweeping lines that spin in maelstroms of color on such canvases as everist ascent and longboat are indicative of the writhing, fluid movement evident in many of the canvases by the New York Artists.

Yet there is a graphic quality to Metcalf’s paintings. Many of the canvases are composed of small rectangles, all vibrant in color, but all applied with great control. Even tiny dots on paintings like Wicked Quick, which at first seem to be nothing more than fine droplets accidentally flicked from the end of a brush are actually pre-meditated applications of paint dabbed on with the head of a pin.

Clint Metcalf, "passata-sotto," acrylic on canvas, 24" x 24". Image: courtesy of the artist

This seems to be where the artist’s experience of graffiti can really be seen. Similar to graffiti, which in some cases can at first seem like simple experiments in formal composition and color until upon closer inspection text is revealed, so do Metcalf’s paintings at first sight belie the meticulousness that reveals itself when given longer meditation.

These calculated details can pull the canvases together with a balance of controlled attention to detail and creative abandon in some, but can leave others a bit stifled. The 2009 painting, rubles, seems stiff, its composition awkward. Yet others achieve an almost ethereal experience. Paintings like sugar sky sunday achieve an all-over composition, and a subtle color variation that gives the canvas a hazy, airy feel. The warm choice of palette and liberal use of white throughout adds to the vaporous effect on the eye.

Clint Metcalf, "sugar sky sunday," acrylic on canvas, 36" x 36". Image: courtesy of the artist

Metcalf also references gutai in several of his paintings. Gutai was an art movement that began in Japan around the same time that Abstract Expressionism was gaining speed in the United States. Metcalf speaks of these artists’ philosophies and their ideas of creating art, and then covering the canvas with black paint, only to remove the paint immediately in an attempt essentially to make the canvas ugly. This is where Metcalf says the use of black in his work comes from. There is not much "ugly" to his work, however, and one wonders if Metcalf isn’t drawn to the energy of these two separate, yet equally motion-based artistic movements.

Clint Metcalf, "epigraphic canopy," acrylic on canvas, 30" x 30". Image: courtesy of the artist

Overall, these paintings are quite fun to look at. The epic swirlings and churnings of thick, palette-knifed canvases keep the eye bouncing from one side of the canvas to the other, until the viewer moves on to one of the calmer, though no less energetic paintings.

-re-

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